Dixie Heights High School honored World Teen Mental Health Day on March 1 by doing activities designed to raise awareness and provide mental health coping skills to students.
“We’re like, let’s do something that we know every student in this building is going to touch,” said Nicole Hoffman, one of the school’s counselors and an advisor for the Dixie Heights Hope Squad. She added that the activities for the day were meant to show the students they “have a community now, that they have somebody behind them, especially for our students that are suffering in silence.”
Hope Squad is a national, evidence-based, peer-to-peer counseling system aimed at reducing rates of teen suicide. Hope Squad is unique in that the interventions are all student-led: Hope Squad members are picked out by fellow students for their empathic dispositions, and teens in the program are trained to persuade their peers to seek out help on their own, rather than being immediately referred to an adult professional.
“Kids are more likely to talk to their peers than adults,” Hoffman said. “And so we have trained some peers here, and they were peer-selected. So, their peers chose them; we didn’t choose them.”
The event coincided with World Teen Mental Health Day. The school had applied for and won a $500 grant from the Joe Burrow Foundation, which the school’s family resource center then used to assemble 1,170 of what they called mental health kits, full of fidgets, affirmation stickers and other items aimed at helping students cope with stress and anxiety. Hope Squad members and members of the school’s Random Acts of Kindness club distributed the kits throughout the school.
In addition, classes each chose from a menu of self-care activities to do during one of their morning class periods, such as journaling, disconnecting from technology, coloring or listening to calming music.
“We just want everybody to find a way that they can learn to have hope in school because school’s hard, and it drains your mental health,” said Bridget Brennen, an 11th grader and member of the Hope Squad.
Brennen was front and center throughout the day, helping distribute the kits throughout the classrooms.
Brennen said stress, anxiety and depression were common issues that teens had to deal with. She herself admitted to experiencing anxiety, which was why programs like the Hope Squad were so important.
“We just need to keep like helping the students get through the a rough days,” Brennen said.
“Mental health is definitely one focus in school,” she went on to say, “because not everybody has somebody to talk to.”
The school had put to together some other resources to encourage the students throughout the day, most notably an affirmation wall, where students could post and take positive aphorisms, written on sticky notes.
“I think that this should go to every school,” Brennen said. “I feel like it has helped our school so much. I love Hope Squad.”
You can learn more about Hope Squad at hopesquad.com and about the Joe Burrow Foundation at joeburrow.org.